Friday, April 24, 2015

Pinterest - place to discover and share idea

For the first time I heard about Pinterest during my visit to California State Library where I learned about their website and the social media accounts they have. They had a direct link to Pinterest account -https://www.pinterest.com/castatelibrary/, so it was pretty easy to reach and discover a new social media platform. There were a lot of different digital collections of visual materials. Later I created my own account on Pinterest, but had little time to learn about its features and forgot about it for some time.  During my class on Social media in the public sector I found out Pinterest to be one of the most fast growing and powerful social media platforms to date.

Pinterest is a place to discover ideas for all your projects and interests, hand-picked by people like you – this is how Pinterest markets itself. This is what Wikipedia says about this tool: “Pinterest is a web and mobile application company, which operates an eponymous photo sharing website. Registration is required for use. Pinterest is a free website that requires registration to use. Users can upload, save, sort, and manage images—known as pins—and other media content (e.g., videos and images) through collections known as pin boards. Pinterest acts as a personalized media platform. Users can browse the content of others on the main page. Users can then save individual pins to one of their own boards using the "Pin It" button, with Pin boards typically organized by a central topic or theme. Users can personalize their experience with Pinterest by pinning items, creating boards, and interacting with other members. By doing so, the users "pin feed" displays unique, personalized results”.

According to the survey by Pew Research Center in 2010, there are 28% of adult internet users or 22% of entire adult population in USA who are actively using Pinterest.  There are more female users on the site; with 42% of female Pinterest users compared to 13% of male users in 2014. Pinterest remains popular among younger generations, there was an increase by 11% comparing to the last year. The table below shows analysis of Pinterest users by Pew Research Center:

 

In my opinion, Pinterest could serve as a great tool for libraries and archives which digitize visual materials and make them available online. Pinterest allows storing and organizing materials into different digital collections and easily sharing it through web-sites and other social media platforms. According to www.fedscoop.com , U.S. military organizations like the US Army, Navy and National Guard have their own Pinterest profiles. Some local governments are also trying to use Pinterest in their practice.

No comments:

Post a Comment